Ms. Davidge was born and raised in Southern California. She went to Arizona State for nursing school, graduating from the Mayo Clinic accelerated nursing program and accepted her first job working as a Surgical/Transplant ICU RN at UCLA Medical Center. One of the main reasons she wanted to get into nursing was to get involved in medical work abroad. Over the years, her passion for social justice/medical missions has taken her to Nepal, India, Australia and the Dominican Republic, but no place has stolen her heart like Kenya. She recalls reading about MMK in the early hours of a night shift at UCLA. She was inspired by Milli’s story and her desire to bring medical help to her home country. She was ecstatic to be selected for the 2013 MMK as it would be her first official medical trip as a RN. On her first trip, she worked as an RN seeing patients alongside the many other wonderful volunteers. She loved traveling to Eldoret to help remove chiggers from the children’s feet and the hot air balloon ride over the Maasai Mara reserve.  Despite being exhausted, she recalls feeling so alive, determined to see as many patients as possible before it got dark each night. Her favorite part was being out of her ICU element and having to think on her feet given the limited resources.

 

As the team leader on her second mission in 2014, Lexy prepared the new members who had a myriad of questions on what to expect or pack for the trip. As soon as we landed in Nairobi, Lexy was thrilled and said that it felt like she was coming back home. She worked in the pharmacy preparing multiple doses of prescription medications that MMK provides to the patients. This time, she extended her trip and worked in Eldoret alongside a family nurse practitioner, to learn the nurse practitioner’s role abroad. There she helped teach a First Aid and CPR class to young professionals, visited patients in the slums and experienced life in a village!  Lexy is so grateful for having these two opportunities to learn from the Kenyan people. Her work with MMK inspired her to apply for NP school in hopes that one day she would return back to the beautiful people of Kenya with the new knowledge she would gain. She then attended UCLA’s acute care nurse practitioner program from 2014-2016.  Before she knew it, she was moving to Dallas, Texas after accepting a nurse practitioner job at Baylor University Medical Center. There she works specifically with mechanical assist devices, cardiogenic shock, transplant and advanced heart failure patients. Now that Lexy is settled in Dallas and confident in her new role as a nurse practitioner, she is thrilled to be returning to Kenya for her third medical mission with MMK in the summer of 2018. As a committee member, she is dedicated to increasing knowledge about the medical needs in places such as rural Kenya and encouraging others to volunteer their time!